Women in Regeneration: The Youngers
I meant to post this fairly quickly after international women’s day but March took over and became a madly busy month. Anyone who knows me well, knows that the source of my work is healing the story of separation, so it may seem strange that I single out ‘women’ in a post. Is that perpetuating one strand of the story of separation? Possibly, if that were my intention. But in a world still dominated by leaders that are male, I feel it continues to be worth lifting up the role of women in any particular field so that we not only have equality but are seen to have it too. Shining a light on the work of women helps to do that.
My particular interest is in the power of place in regeneration so for the Youngers I’m focusing on those women who are doing place-sourced regeneration. Many of these women are not famous or well known. They work quietly restoring and regenerating places around the world, that will gradually mean the realisation of healthy regenerative places networked into one wide space of planetary health. That’s our aspiration! There are of course many more than I name here in leadership, economics, finance, and other fields. Youngers is also relative compared to my Elders post! Perhaps there will be a ‘youngest’ to come!
Regenerative Activists
Lyla June
Lyla June speaks with enormous clarity about the indigenous approach to inhabiting the land. She is a regenerative storyteller of power and eloquence. There is little I can say to illustrate her influence other than to suggest you watch the TEDx talk below. It says everything needed about our deepest and most powerful co-mutual relationship as humans, to place.
Regenerative Placemakers
Sarah Achioka, built environment
It is only very recently that I’ve had the privilege of talking with Sarah in person. I’ve long been a follower of her work in the built environment. As co-author with Michael Pawlyn of Flourish: Design Paradigms for Our Planetary Emergency, she incorporates regenerative design principles into approaches for addressing our compound environmental and social crises. Sarah leads Desire Lines, a strategic consultancy for environmental, cultural, and social-impact initiatives and organizations that is based in Singapore. More than being a leading author, Sarah is a deeply thoughtful practitioner and contributor to the future who actively self-evolves her roles in the built environment.
India Hamilton, food systems Jersey
I have never met anyone who has as much experimental courage as India. A passionate chef and an amazing cook (accept the invite to dinner if you get one), India combines activism, systems change and regeneration through her many different initiatives. The one I know best is SCOOP the Sustainable Collective on Jersey that has done so much to spark change in the local food system, and caught the attention of the local government. India designs from a deep understanding of systemic nodes; she is remarkably able to find the critical nodes in a system that will activate transformative change, and then design just the ‘right’ intervention at the ‘right’ time, to activate them, knitting a chain of seemingly disparate events into a journey towards whole system change. It’s a practice all regenerative placemakers need.
Bioregional Weavers
Samantha Smithson, Sussex
Sam takes regenerative practice very seriously! Since I met Sam, she instantly grasped the nature of practice that is at the heart of regenerative placemaking. I have never met anyone with the commitment to practice sewing the seeds of regeneration so well. In every conversation, meeting, gathering, Sam is awake and alert to the potential that is in the air — both of the people and place. Being in the tourism field with Experience West Sussex— which holds so much opportunity for regeneration — Sam is weaving a regenerative tourism field across the region, connecting so many different people and projects together in the field so that the system can see itself. It’s often quiet and unacknowledged work, but it a vital role. Sam is also owner of an aqua sports business in Surrey where she is currently practising regeneration on the board and the board!
Maria Benjamin, Lake District
Regenerative work demands long-time perspective and long-term tenacity. Maria has both in spades. As a hill farmer in the Lake District at Dodgson Wood, Maria has a passion she shares with her partner John, to protect the vital work that rare breeds and hill farming can do in regenerating landscapes. A successful entrepreneur who has been a beacon of diversification for her region, Maria joined Power of Place some years ago with a group of colleagues who wanted to explore what could be done for farmers to get a better price for wool, for rare breeds to ensure a continued focus on them, for the region as a whole to become more ecologically and economically viable, and for the role of wool as a natural source of material that is now largely ignored and undervalued. The Wool Library is a first step towards a future regenerative evolution of wool in the landscape which first tells the stories of the unique properties of wool, and rare breed wool, in order to stimulate knowledge and interest but also to create an ecosystem of connected communities around the world who want to evolve a new role for wool in human fashion and use.
Noa Lodeizen, Europe
If bioregionalism is one of the central tenets of future regenerative design, then it needs people who are prepared to practice it — however challenging that sounds. Noa is one of those people. As co-founder of Ashoka’s collaborative collective Bioregional Weaving Labs which brings together many different groups to regenerative over 1 million hectares of land and sea in Europe by 2030. Weaving multiple stakeholders towards collaboration and co-creation in a world that is still dominated by competitive individualism requires deep and nuanced understanding of the way in which regenerative design enables individuals to fulfil their potential whilst working on projects that regenerate place, so that those projects can regenerate whole systems. Brava.
Isabel Carlisle, Devon
Isabel beavers quietly away in a corner of the UK called South Devon. A passionate bioregionalist, Isabel is another wonderful weaver of connections in this particular place, bringing together organisations and people who would otherwise work in siloes. This region, which contains world-renowned Schumacher College — a centre of regenerative and ecological learning — and Totnes, home of the Transition movement, is a bubbling centre of change in which Isabel is one of the unique nodes and pioneer species. The Bioregional Learning Centre in Totnes is home to many wonderful projects including action learning, Voices of the Dart, River Keepers and The Saltmarsh Project.
Regenerative Organisation as Place
Roberta Iley, Gabi De La Rosa, Josie Warden, Joanna Choekir, Philipa Duthie
These five brilliant women are of course each five whole unique people but in my mind they are also a whole together as I first connected with them all (except Roberta) through Power of Place when they joined the first ever programme. Though Josie is now at Volans, and Roberta back at Forum for the Future — two other organisations that are working towards regenerative futures — they are always associated together in my mind as the team that brough regenerative futures into the work of The RSA in the UK. Each brings especial gifts to the regenerative world.
Philippa through her ability to share the stories of the regeneration in engaging podcasts, catalysing the convening power of the RSA — I have been envious of that work and always wished I had time to do podcasts!
Josie through her vision to capture how this organisation could play an important role in regenerative transformation and to encourage the whole organisation to join in.
Joanna for her leadership in holding that cauldron of change together and being a bridge between worlds as The RSA aspires to lead regeneration externally and embody its practice internally to become a coherent whole.
Roberta and Gabi for their deep commitment to shaping the on-going developmental culture that will enable those inside to change, and transform those others and systems the organisation encounters and works with.
Five truly remarkable people it’s been my privilege to work with.
Regenerative Indigenous Innovation
Julia Watson, Indigenous Innovation
Lo-Tek is one of the bibles I carry around with me. Few books you encounter explode in your mind like a kaleidoscope of possibility, marrying rich and often lost history to its potential role in our future. Julia captures something which offers radical hope for the future: a way to reimagine our relationship to the technology that obsesses us towards an indigenous perspective of technology. It is one of the richest feasts of indigenous knowledge about how to reinhabit place with wisdom I have ever read.
Regenerative Re-Sourcing
Beatrice Ungard
Beatrice is one of the best regenerative re-sources I have ever met. When I first studied with Regenesis, my small group was lucky enough to be allocated Beatrice. Re-sourcing is a particular quality that all regenerative practitioners develop, but some are better at it than others! It is about having the ability to truly listen and hear what the underlying patterns are in a challenge or conversation, and then being able to ask just the right question which leads to regenerative development — of the individual or team, and the project. It takes many years of practice to become as adept as Beatrice. Beatrice is one of the many re-sources that are part of the Regenesis network, and she is, IMHO, one of the best. All Regenesis work stems from place, so whilst re-sourcing is needed everywhere, Beatrice’s work — along with all the Regenesis team — enables so many of us in place-sourced work to continue to find pathways around the many rocks in the road which present.
Regenerative Pioneer Species
Isabella Tree, wilding pioneer
Many people outside the UK have never heard of Isabella Tree, nor read her book Wilding. Her project, together with Charlie, at Knepp Estate in Sussex, England was one of the first large scale rewilding projects in the UK. Together they took the private estate they owned and had farmed quite intensively for many decades (if not centuries) and embarked on a project of rewilding the land to see at what level, and how, biodiversity could be restored. Sometimes it needs a brave soul to try something radically different in a system in order for collective courage to emerge. Not every landscape suits rewilding, but it is impossible to estimate the importance of having a project that has become and national and international experiment that raised the bar for this kind of work to be part of a restorative and regenerative future.
Dr Dominique Hes
Like many regenerative placemakers, Dominique wears many hats. Few people dance successfully between horizons and are effective in all — the current, the disruptive and the regenerative — but Dominique is. As Chair of Greenfleet she is engaged in restorative reforestation in collaboration with farmers and landowners which creates both more carbon sinks, but also offers an interim solution to carbon offsetting whilst the regenerative finance and economic sectors try to create more transformational change. In her role as head of Zero Carbon Buildings for the great city of Melbourne, she’s helping the transformation of energy systems from carbon to renewable energy. It is in her role as educator, that I first encountered her — and the term regenerative placemaking. Dominique was one of the first people to academically express how living systems design, rigorous and regenerative community engagement, transdisciplinary research and education, could be aligned to biomimicry and biophilic aesthetics in place. Her book Designing for Hope is another of my bibles.
Ruth Andrade, philanthropic pioneer
How do you describe someone with the vision to design the right response as a critical node for change in a system? A nodal engineer? — too mechanistic. A pioneer species — true but they come and go quite quickly when an ecosystem is ready to establish. A keystone species is closer. As co-founder of the Lush Spring Prize which first recognised the efforts of many small projects to create systemic change, and subsequently as the co-founder of Regenerosity — an organisation she shaped when she found that the limitations of the Lush Spring Prize philanthropic approach — where only a handful of projects were funded — was inadequate to meet the needs of transformation. Regenerosity’s future aim is to regenerate philanthropy itself into a new and more appropriate model for the demands of equity, injustice and the existential challenges of the 21st century. It focuses funding towards specific places with specific challenges in which the funder themselves participates in a regenerative development process. It is quietly genius.
Are there others? Of course. There are 8 billion people in the world — not all working on regeneration of course — but there are many more who are working daily at this great transition and transformation of our relationship with earth that I don’t know and have never connected to. But I feel kinship with them all even though I may never know them.
